- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: Wave Books (May 1 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0972348778
- ISBN-13: 978-0972348775
- Product Dimensions: 24 x 15.7 x 0.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 136 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,801,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Rohrer won the National Poetry Series 10 years ago with A Hummock in the Malookas; this fourth book of poetry follows hard on the heels of Nice Hat. Thanks, his comic-verse collaboration with Joshua Beckman. Though it includes serious ecological themes (notably in "Hone Quarry," a series of 56-syllable stanzas about a camping trip), this wary, slippery new volume's dominant notes are deadpan humor and bleak nonstop irony. "No one watches over us unless our uncles/ are flying planes," Rohrer warns in "I Hail from the Bottom of the Sea, the Land of Eternal Darkness." Another long poem, "MK Ultra" (named for the CIA's infamous LSD tests), shows a "patron saint of corridors" chowing down on "the most/ gorgonzola he'd ever eaten." If Rohrer sometimes seems (like James Tate) out to entertain, he also (like Tate) tries to learn from Eastern Europeans, whose juxtapositions poked fun at the absence of God, or described life inside a police state. On occasion Rohrer captures not just their humor but their urgency. Much of the volume, however, ends up so committed to its self-conscious stance that the poems have time for little else: with lines like "I want to be an interesting story/ none of you really remembers," they're less Tomasz Salamun than David Letterman.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Matthew Rohrer’s simple, hilarious, generous and strangely disquieting poems conjure versions of the most familiar aspects of our lives—friendship, marriage, childhood, work—into which intrude incongruous, peculiar, fantastical, yet somehow totally recognizable elements. Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we’ve learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine New Voice, Dec 2 2006
By Driver9 - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Green Light (Paperback)
There is no poet speaking the same language as Matthew Rohrer, subtle, powerful, engmatic, elegant. His voice is entirely distinctive and I am very surprised to be the only person reviewing this book of poetry so far, and it was published in 2004. What gives?
"But what good is the incantation
against an Empire?
The answer is on the other side
of the Moon we're not supposed to see."
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